4/06/2010 @ 6:00AM

Making Your Web Site Easy

These days, we’re always telling consumers coming to our Web sites to “simply” sign up for a service or make a purchase. But if your shopping carts are left abandoned, or your registration forms are filled out incorrectly, maybe your Web site isn’t as simple as it needs be.

At that point, it’s time to recruit your friends, your neighbors, your parents or anyone else who’s handy, to act as a volunteer focus group and give you an honest outside perspective about what’s right and wrong with your site. It’s a common approach, one that Web developers large and small practice, and it can result in useful information at the right price.

But using free Web testers has limitations. For example, they may be influenced by some insider knowledge, understanding what you’re trying to accomplish online in a way that a stranger wouldn’t.

If money is no object, hire a consultant to perform formal usability testing, recruiting a panel of users to be tested in a lab setting, with observers watching over their shoulders, taking notes. But if you’re a small to midsize business, and your Web budget is already stretched, you can get something like that done much more cheaply through UserTesting.com, which will recruit people to test your site for a base price of $39 per tester.

The test subjects navigate your site while describing what they’re seeing; both their screen movements and voices are recorded for later viewing. When they’re done, they answer a questionnaire. That means that you get both a written report and a video of them using your Web site and telling you exactly what was easy or difficult, clear or confusing.

I heard about the service from Web consultant Bryan Eisenberg, whom I had originally called to ask about Web analytics tools for tracking patterns of use on your site.
Google
Analytics is popular with small businesses (and many larger ones) because it’s free, and because it can help you understand how people are finding your site through Google. But Eisenberg recommends going beyond that level of analysis, and he published a list of “69 Free (or low cost) Tools to Improve Your Website,” putting UserTesting.com at No. 1.

“You get this panel of people who know how to give reviews in this talk-out-loud method, and they tell you exactly what they experience as they go through your Web site,” Eisenberg says. And it’s inexpensive enough that there is no excuse not to do it, he says.

UserTesting.com founders Dave Garr and Darrell Benatar met when Benatar was president of the gift-giving e-commerce site Surprise.com and brought in Garr as a usability consultant. “I became kind of a convert to usability testing at that point, after seeing how many things people were having difficulty with that I never would have expected,” Benatar says.

The two remained friends and later came up with the idea that there ought to be a more efficient way to conduct the tests, given that it was costing Garr $500 to $1,000 per test subject to recruit them, plus the cost of renting lab space. UserTesting.com signs up test subjects online and pays them $10 for a 10- to 20-minute test. First, they have to do a trial run on a sample Web site and demonstrate they can talk their way through it. Only about one in five applicants is approved, Benatar says.

The testing pool is also limited to residents of the U.S., Canada and the U.K.

The company then plays matchmaker between the testers and its customers. “It really only takes maybe three to five people, and at the end of the process you have pages of notes and all sorts of things to change and test,” Benatar says. “The smaller businesses tend to use it and discover a bunch of stuff, then maybe come back in a year and try something else.”

Although the company boasts endorsements from people at big companies like Twitter and 20th Century Fox, most customers are small to midsize Web operations, he says–or individuals within those larger companies willing to expense the test on their credit cards.

Maybe the results aren’t quite as good as those a traditional usability lab would produce. But for the majority of Web site owners who would otherwise do no testing, or never get beyond the friends-and-neighbors variety, the quick-and-dirty UserTesting.com option is 100% better than nothing.